Patricia Cornwell, the celebrated crime novelist, likes to see herself as an old-fashioned Southern girl, and when you meet her certain formalities have to be observed. First, there are the high, spiky gates of her estate to negotiate, then a long walk down a corridor bristling with electronic sensors, and finally a room with a rack of shotguns and a .357 Magnum poking from a Gucci slingbag.

By the time Ms Cornwell appears, you don’t know whether to offer a handshake or wave a white flag. She thinks such precautions reflect prudence rather than paranoia, and cites the fact that she’s still around as proof that her blast’em-to-hell-if-they-try-anything approach works. Or, at least, hasn’t failed yet. “If someone wants to give me a problem,” she will say, “I’m going to make things damned difficult for them.”

People have been giving 56-year-old Ms Cornwell problems ever since she became a global fiction phenomenon in the early 1990s, and last week offered an illustration of how difficult she can make things.

The author was awarded $50 million by a Boston court against a financial management company she had hired to look after her money. She claimed the firm had helped itself to her earnings, and that by the time she realised what was happening, her fortune had been drastically depleted.

Rich people with little understanding of finance make easy prey for sharp operators, but the firm Ms Cornwell chose – Anchin, Block & Anchin – is a long-established New York operation with a good reputation and an impressive client list. Why would it risk everything by fleecing one of America’s best-known authors?

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The firm insists it didn’t, and in a vigorous defence argued that the reason for the losses was Ms Cornwell’s extravagant lifestyle. The court was told that the author maintained several grand properties – including estates in Massachusetts and Florida – paid $40,000-a-month for a little-used Manhattan apartment, spent $5 million on private jets and a personal helicopter, kept a Bentley Continental and a Ferrari for ground travel as well as paying $1,000-a-day to a car service company, had a personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman, the chic New York department store, and supported a large staff, at least one of whom earned $100,000-a-year.

All this was compounded, said Anchin’s lawyer, James Campbell, by the fact that Ms Cornwell was “a difficult client.”

No one has ever claimed that she is easy. Or that her mind strays far from its profitable preoccupation with the darker side of life. The world, as Ms Cornwell sees it, is a scary place, filled with fantasists, stalkers and crazies, in which all horrors are possible and constant danger awaits. If she packs a Magnum in her handbag and sleeps with a semi-automatic under her pillow, it is, she says, because the threats are real. “And I know they are real, because I have learnt enough about evil to recognise it.”

Yet the anxieties that haunt her appear to come as much from the unhappiness of her past as from the real or imagined attentions of stray psychos. Her childhood was scarred by family breakdown, her adolescence blighted by anorexia, her first marriage failed, and after a lengthy, occasionally comic, interlude of sexual confusion, she came out as a lesbian, and now lives on a large, leafy spread near Boston with Staci Gruber, a Harvard neuroscientist.

Her books, usually featuring ace police pathologist Kay Scarpetta, are heavy on crime-scene depictions, overlaid with riffs of graphic mortuary-slab chatter. In a Cornwell novel, Scarpetta gets to say catchy lines such as “I’ll check the brain for petchial haemorrhages, and look at the soft tissue of the mediastinum for extra-alveolar air.” In Ms Cornwell’s hands, these become not merely stories, but excursions into criminal psychology and the mechanics of murder. “I am a fiction writer only to the extent that my characters are invented,” she says. “In every other sense, I’m still a reporter.”

Ms Cornwell indeed served her time on a local paper in North Carolina, where she grew up, and in her writing can still be found the breathless imprint of the deadline-haunted newshound.Yet when she set out to write novels there were dozens – hundreds – of decent crime authors on the market. Something different was needed, and she found it when she left journalism to take a job at the town morgue in Richmond, Virginia.

The change was forced by the relocation of her clergyman husband, Charles Cornwell. The marriage didn’t last, but Patricia came out of her year-long stint at the morgue with a good knowledge of autopsies, and an understanding of the old pathologist’s saying that “a body doesn’t lie”. She had long felt the urge to write books, and with Scarpetta emerging in her mind as a heroine and a setting that she could exploit, she went to work. Her breakthrough novel, Postmortem, the story of a Virginia serial killer murdering wealthy women in their sleep, brought her instant success and her first taste of real money.

Not that everything ran smoothly. As her fame grew, a female assistant brought a law suit against her, alleging sexual harassment, and Esquire magazine claimed that she had formed an unnatural obsession with Hollywood actress Jodie Foster. This was followed by a bizarre incident in which an FBI agent, Eugene Bennett, opened fire on his wife during a church service, telling police later that she had left him for Ms Cornwell.

Her life may look more settled now, but there is little to suggest it runs more smoothly. “I am outraged by injustice,” she said after the Boston jury ruled in her favour. “I feel as though a giant rock has been lifted off me.”

But another one may already be whistling through the air. Anchin has made clear that it intends to appeal. “Where did the money go?” asks Mr Campbell. “Ms Cornwell and Dr Gruber spent it.”